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Green buildings aren't that green
written by Sunita Narain, published in Business Strandard.October 10, 2014

So are green buildings really
green? I want to follow up on our discussions on this critical issue. The
building sector is set to grow exponentially. It already has a huge
environmental footprint - the domestic and commercial sectors consume some 30
per cent of India's electricity. So the imperative to go green is clear. The
question is where India is and where it should go.

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The Bureau of Energy
Efficiency (BEE) has issued the Energy Conservation Building Code (ECBC) to
improve the energy performance of buildings. It is expected that an
ECBC-compliant building will use anywhere between 40 and 60 per cent less
energy than its conventional counterpart. State governments are now adopting this
code in their building permissions - Odisha and Rajasthan have made it
mandatory. But enforcement of this code - which is largely prescriptive in
terms of building design - remains a challenge.

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The code itself has problems
but these can be fixed in its next revision. The problem is bigger, when you
understand that the code is for building design, with certain assumptions that
its implementation will reduce energy use. But a big problem is that the use of
the code in design is not linked to the actual performance of the building
after it has been commissioned.

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What the BEE has in addition
is a voluntary star rating scheme, which sets the Energy Performance Index
(EPI) of four categories of buildings -day use office, IT/BPO (with extended
hours of work), hospitals and retail malls. The EPI is calculated differently
for different climatic zones - hot and dry, temperate, composite, and warm and
humid. But the rating, which is for an operational building, has no direct link
to the ECBC. So there is no data to show what the design has actually achieved
and there is no feedback loop that would improve design based on operational
experience. Also, as yet, the BEE has not rated any building based on its
index.

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There are two other
green-building certifying agencies in the country. The Indian Green Building
Council (IGBC) started out as a United States initiative but is now wholly
Indian and is promoted by the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII)-Sohrabji
Godrej Green Business Centre. It runs a certification programme that rates
buildings platinum, gold or silver, based on different criteria. Delhi-based
The Energy and Resources Institute has its Green Rating for Integrated Habitat
Assessment (GRIHA). Many state governments provide fiscal incentives and even
bonus floor area ratio, or FAR, to builders who produce green certificates from
these agencies.

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The actual proof will,
however, be in the actual data on the use of energy and water in a commissioned
building. But there is little data on this. In other words, governments are
giving away largesse without any verification. A few months ago, the IGBC put
on its website information on the actual energy and water consumption of 50 of
the buildings it had rated, out of some 450 in total. When my colleagues at the
Centre for Science and Environment (CSE) analysed this data, all hell broke
loose.

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Why? Because we found that
many reputed companies that had been given platinum rating were actually energy
and water guzzlers. Obviously, this is not easy for companies to accept. The
CII has written on their behalf arguing that we have got our analysis wrong
because we have mixed up the typologies for the buildings. So, they say, ITC
Saharanpur is a factory building, which has been compared to an office
building. But IGBC gives its rating only for the office operations of a
"factory". The CSE in its analysis used the EPI set by the BEE for an
office building and found that as against the EPI of 190 for a composite
climate, the ITC building has an EPI of 379, which is almost double.

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Wipro in Gurgaon is an IT
building, with server loads operating for 24 hours. It has been compared
against performance benchmarks for an office building, says the CII. But the
CII misses the fact that when the CSE compared the same building using the EPI
for an IT/BPO complex - calculated as the annual average hourly EPI to take
into account its extended hours - it exceeded the energy limits for them as
well. Similarly, Wipro's office in Kolkata was found to be more than nine times
higher than the minimum benchmark set by the BEE for a warm and humid climate.

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The CSE analysis also finds
that there are IGBC-rated buildings that match or are below the EPI set for
their category for their climatic zone. So something is working, and we hope
the CII and its partners will ask how they can learn from the best example so
that expensive green features pay off in terms of performance.

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More importantly, regulators
need to get their act together on this issue. The CSE analysis is based on
self-disclosure by companies, which is not verified or audited. The government
needs to build a credible system of assurance, so that it can really push what
is green, and not just what looks green from the outside but may be brown
inside. It is time, as we say, to go beyond the green façade.

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(For more on this see CSE's
publication Building Sense: Beyond the Green Façade of Sustainable Habitats.
The writer is at the CSE, sunita@cseindia.org,
Twitter: @sunitanar)